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A Generation Finds Its Mumble

From left, Ry Russo-Young and Greta Gerwig in Hannah Takes the Stairs, directed by Joe Swanberg, one of the leading practitioners of mumblecore.Credit
IFC

RECENT rumblings — perhaps one should say mumblings — indicate an emerging movement in American independent film. Specimens of the genre share a low-key naturalism, low-fi production values and a stream of low-volume chatter often perceived as ineloquence. Hence the name: mumblecore.

More a loose collective or even a state of mind than an actual aesthetic movement, mumblecore concerns itself with the mundane vacillations of postcollegiate existence. It can seem like these movies, which star nonprofessional actors and feature quasi-improvised dialogue, seldom deal with matters more pressing than whether to return a phone call. When the heroine of “Funny Ha Ha” (2002), the film that kicked off the mumblecore wave, writes out a to-do list, the items include “Learn to play chess?” and “Fitness initiative!!”

But what these films understand all too well is that the tentative drift of the in-between years masks quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight. Mumblecore narratives hinge less on plot points than on the tipping points in interpersonal relationships. A favorite setting is the party that goes subtly but disastrously astray. Events are often set in motion by an impulsive, ill-judged act of intimacy.

Artists who mine life’s minutiae are by no means new, but mumblecore bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube. It also signals a paradigm shift in how movies are made and how they find an audience. “This is the first time, mostly because of technology, that someone like me can go out and make a film with no money and no connections,” said Aaron Katz, whose movies “Dance Party USA” and “Quiet City” will be shown as part of a 10-film mumblecore series at the IFC Center that begins Wednesday and continues through Sept. 4.

Boosted in the last two years by enthusiastic word of mouth at film festivals and on blogs, movies like Mr. Katz’s have gained a following in the hipster enclaves where they are often set. Depending on how you define mumblecore, the category now includes 10 to 20 films. There have been a few commercial success stories and even the odd Hollywood flirtation. Jay and Mark Duplass’s “Puffy Chair” was released jointly by Netflix and the distributor Roadside Attractions and, thanks to aggressive promotion to Netflix subscribers, did well in theaters and even better on DVD. Andrew Bujalski, whose “Funny Ha Ha” and “Mutual Appreciation” are the best reviewed of the crop, is to write and direct an adaptation of “Indecision,” a novel by Benjamin Kunkel, for the producer Scott Rudin.

But for the most part mumblecore has stayed small precisely because it can. The need for traditional distribution deals is diminished when production costs are often as low as a few thousand dollars. “These filmmakers seem remarkably free of the anxiety you see in indie film directors who have brought their higher-budgeted films to festivals and are praying for them to sell,” said Scott Macaulay, a veteran indie producer and the editor of Filmmaker magazine, which recently ran a cover story on mumblecore. “The films feel more like dialogues between filmmakers and their audiences and less like calling cards to the studios.”

Alert to the business implications of the “long tail” theory about niche markets, the mumblecore crew has approached not just production but also distribution with a D.I.Y. mind-set. Mr. Bujalski’s first two films were self-distributed. Many of the directors have sold home-burned DVDs online.

Mumblecore’s origin myth locates the watershed at the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Tex., which screened a cluster of small, superficially similar films (including “The Puffy Chair” and “Mutual Appreciation”). The filmmakers hit it off. At a bar one night Mr. Bujalski’s sound mixer, Eric Masunaga, coined the word “mumblecore.”

“It was an obnoxious name nobody liked and it was meant to be a joke,” said the director Joe Swanberg, who was at the festival that year with his first feature, “Kissing on the Mouth.” “But we haven’t been able to get rid of it.”

It was Mr. Bujalski who first publicly uttered the term in an interview with Indiewire.com. “I should apologize for that,” he said recently.

It’s only fitting that the etymology should be a point of contention, since the films in question often deal with the fraught process of identity formation. Journalists and bloggers have floated other tags, including the self-explanatory “bedhead cinema” and “Slackavettes,” in homage to the patron saint of American indie auteurs, John Cassavetes. The IFC Center series, despite using “mumblecore” in its publicity materials, is officially called “The New Talkies: Generation D.I.Y.”

Mr. Bujalski, speaking by phone from Austin, where he had just finished shooting his third feature, objected to the very idea of a movement. “It makes perfect sense for bloggers to sift through the films and pluck out commonalities,” he said. “But the reductive concept that we’re somehow the same — that bugs me.”

There are indeed striking differences among the so-called mumblecorps. Mr. Bujalski, 30, is the elder statesman, and his movies are the most artful and sophisticated of the bunch, not least for being shot on film instead of handheld video.

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Mr. Swanberg, 25, is the most prolific and the most committed to improvisation. His new film, “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” which will have a weeklong run during the series, was shot without a script; he shares writing credit with the actors. The creator of “Young American Bodies,” a Web series on Nerve.com, he is much more sexually candid than his colleagues. In a notorious scene in “Kissing on the Mouth,” he actually masturbates on camera.

Mr. Katz, 25, is more sensitive than his peers to the aesthetic limits and possibilities of digital video and has a more poetic sense of place. Frank V. Ross, 26, has received less exposure than the others, perhaps because his films are rougher-hewn and emotionally harsher. His latest, “Hohokam,” features slightly older, sadder characters and plays like a sober sequel to the first-generation mumblecore films.

As in most artistic movements, there is cross-pollination and tacit one-upmanship. Mr. Swanberg said he made “Kissing on the Mouth” partly in response to Mr. Bujalski’s “Funny Ha Ha,” whose characters he found passive-aggressive.

But the prevailing spirit is of friendly collaboration. Two of the three male leads in Mr. Swanberg’s “Hannah” are played by Mr. Bujalski and Mark Duplass. Mr. Katz edited the film’s trailer. Mr. Swanberg appears in Mr. Katz’s “Quiet City” and Mr. Ross’s “Hohokam.” Since most of them live in different cities — Mr. Bujalski in Boston, Mr. Swanberg and Mr. Ross in Chicago, Mr. Katz in New York — film festivals function as social hubs, networking events and de facto casting sessions.

While many of these movies have screened at festivals, mumblecore is the sole significant American indie film wave of the last 20 years to have emerged outside the ecosystem of the Sundance Film Festival. (“The Puffy Chair” is the only one to have screened at Sundance; Mr. Bujalski and Mr. Swanberg have had films rejected by the festival.)

For credibility purposes the perception of the mumblecorps as underdog outsiders, too indie for Sundance, is hardly a bad thing. Especially not since South by Southwest, which takes place in March, two months after Sundance, has stepped up to serve as the movement’s unofficial headquarters. Matt Dentler, the producer of South by Southwest, said that a few years ago he resolved to “find films that bigger festivals wouldn’t be able to take a chance on.”

Despite the anti-Sundance image, mumblecore has ancestors in American indie cinema. Given that the films are often anthropological studies of 20-something mating rituals, attuned to the halting rhythms and circular digressions of actual speech, Richard Linklater is perhaps the most obvious forefather. (“Quiet City” is a scruffy cover version of Mr. Linklater’s meet-cute romance “Before Sunrise,” substituting the F train for the Eurostar.) Some critics have suggested loftier reference points like the French masters of talk Eric Rohmer and Jean Eustache.

For potential haters, mumblecore offers plenty of ammunition. The films are modest in scope, but their concentration on daily banalities can register as narcissism. Despite the movement’s communitarian ethos, from the outside it can seem incestuous and insular. Hardly models of diversity, the films are set in mostly white, straight, middle-class worlds, and while female characters are often well drawn, the directors are overwhelmingly male.

To their credit, most of these films offset their navel-gazing tendencies with a dose of skepticism. The filmmakers view their characters with empathy but don’t let them off the hook; Mr. Swanberg and Mr. Bujalski often assign themselves the least flattering roles available. “A lot of that is actual self-critique,” said Mr. Swanberg, whose “LOL” is a withering portrayal of masculine self-absorption in an age of high-tech addictions.

Mumblecore’s inherent emphasis on the transitional periods of life should in theory save it from an ignominious middle age. Even as this generational sensibility expands its reach — Mr. Swanberg spent part of the summer in London acting in a British mumblecore indie — its pioneers have already begun to outgrow it.

Mr. Katz is working on a ’70s-set screenplay that he said would be ill-suited to micro-budget methods. Mr. Swanberg got married this year and wants to explore new issues, “more societal and less personal,” he said. “If I have to watch another conversation on a couch, I’m going to kill myself.”

His fatigue also has to do with having made four films in three years. At the heart of the mumblecore movement is a utopian impulse: the merging of art and life. The danger, as Mr. Swanberg has found, is that the art can get in the way of the life. When he wrapped his fourth film, “Nights and Weekends,” he said, “I realized that because I’d been producing so much work, I hadn’t changed enough as a person between projects. At that point I couldn’t make another movie even if I’d wanted to, because I hadn’t had a life for so long.”